The Inner Life: Inner Land--A Guide into the Heart of the Gospel, Volume 1

By Eberhard Arnold

Part of a major promotional effort for the 2020 centennial of Plough, the publishing house Arnold founded. Other plans include a new website, social media accounts, email lists, events, and publicity.

First volume in a beautifully designed series of 10 titles by this author, including reissues and new titles.

Now back in print, this influential theologian’s magnum opus will be more accessible in five smaller books, released at 4-month increments.

Significant influence: Eberhard Arnold interacted with contemporaries such as Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller, Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, and Jürgen Moltmann.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Plough Publishing House
• Release date: Jul 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9780874860696

Eberhard Arnold

Eberhard Arnold (1883–1935) studied theology, philosophy, and education and was widely sought as a speaker at student conferences and other gatherings. In 1920, leaving a promising career as a writer and the privileges of upper-middle- class life in Berlin, he moved with his wife and children to Sannerz, a small village in central Germany, where they founded a Christian community on the basis of the Sermon on the Mount.

Book preview

Preface

Born to an academic family in the Prussian city of Königsberg, Eberhard Arnold (1883–1935) received a doctorate in philosophy and became a sought-after writer and speaker in Germany. Yet like thousands of other young Europeans in the turbulent years following World War I, he and his wife, Emmy, were disillusioned by the failure of the establishment – especially the churches – to provide answers to the problems facing society.

In 1920, out of a desire to put into practice the teachings of Jesus, the Arnolds turned their backs on the privileges of middle-class life in Berlin and moved to the village of Sannerz with their five young children. There, with a handful of others, they started an intentional community on the basis of the Sermon on the Mount, drawing inspiration from the early Christians and the sixteenth-century Anabaptists. The community, which supported itself by agriculture and publishing, attracted thousands of visitors and eventually grew into the international movement known as the Bruderhof.

Eberhard Arnold’s magnum opus, Inner Land absorbed his energies off and on for most of his adult life. Begun in the months before World War I broke out, the first version of the book was published in 1914 as a patriotic pamphlet for German soldiers titled War: A Call to Inwardness. The first version to carry the title Inner Land appeared after the war in 1918; Arnold had extensively revised the text in light of his embrace of Christian pacifism. In 1932 Arnold began a new edit, reflecting the influence of religious socialism and his immersion in the writings of the sixteenth-century Radical Reformation, as well as his experiences living in the Sannerz community. Arnold continued to rework the book during the following three years, as he and the community became targets of increasing harassment as opponents of Nazism. The final text, on which this translation is based, was published in 1936. Arnold had died one year earlier as the result of a failed surgery.

This final version of Inner Land was not explicitly critical of the Nazi regime. Instead, it attacked the spirits that fed German society’s support for Nazism: racism and bigotry, nationalistic fervor, hatred of political enemies, a desire for vengeance, and greed. At the same time, Arnold was not afraid to critique the evils of Bolshevism.

The chapter Light and Fire, in particular, was a deliberate public statement at a decisive moment of Germany’s history. Eberhard Arnold sent Hitler a copy on November 9, 1933. A week later the Gestapo raided the community and ransacked the author’s study. After the raid, Eberhard Arnold had two Bruderhof members pack the already printed signatures of Inner Land in watertight metal boxes and bury them at night on the hill behind the community for safekeeping. They later dug up Inner Land and smuggled it out of the country, publishing it in Lichtenstein after Eberhard Arnold’s death. Emmy Arnold later fulfilled her husband’s wish and added marginal Bible references. (Footnotes are added by the editors.)

At first glance, the focus of Inner Land seems to be the cultivation of the spiritual life. This would be misleading. Eberhard Arnold writes:

These are times of distress; they do not allow us to retreat just because we are willfully blind to the overwhelming urgency of the tasks that press upon human society. We cannot look for inner detachment in an inner and outer isolation…. The only thing that could justify withdrawing into the inner self to escape today’s confusing, hectic whirl would be that fruitfulness is enriched by it. It is a question of gaining within, through unity with the eternal powers, that strength of character which is ready to be tested in the stream of the world.

Inner Land, then, calls us not to passivity, but to action. It invites us to discover the abundance of a life lived for God. It opens our eyes to the possibilities of that inner land of the invisible where our spirit can find the roots of its strength. Only there, says Eberhard Arnold, will we find the clarity of vision we need to win the daily battle that is life, and the inner anchor without which we will lose our moorings amid the mass emotions and follies of the modern age.

The Editors

Introduction

The object of the book Inner Land: A Guide into the Heart of the Gospel [of which this volume contains only the introduction and the first three chapters] is to make an appeal in all the political, social, and economic upheaval today. It is an appeal for decision in the area of faith and beliefs, directed to the hearts of all those who do not want to forget or lose God and his ultimate kingdom. Using the events of contemporary history, this book attempts to point out that God’s approaching judgment is aimed at our hearts, that the living Christ wants to move our innermost being through his quickening Spirit. Through this Spirit, who moves and stimulates everything, we are meant to gain, from within, a life that outwardly demonstrates justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit, as a form of life shaped by God’s active love.

Heb. 10:23–39

Rom. 14:17

In contrast to the path generally trodden today – one that tries to reach the inner life from the outside – this way must shine outward from within. Our spirit, received by the first man as God’s breath, must first of all be at home in our innermost being; our spirit must find the living roots of its strength there before it can press on to the periphery of life. Yet its calling is just this: to gain that mastery over all external things which to a large extent it has lost in the world of today. Man has lost his rulership over the earth and the just use of its wealth and resources because, through deep inner revolt, his spirit has been estranged from the breath of God and from his love.

Rom. 8:2

Gen. 2:7

Gen. 1:26

Gen. 3:17–19

This book, then, should bear witness to the way into the inner land of the invisible; it should bear witness to the way to God and to the Spirit and to love renewed again and again as the innermost experience of faith; and starting from here (for only then is it possible) it should bear witness to the best way to be effective as Christians.

Already before the [First] World War, several voices challenged Germans not to forget their mission to lead to the inner land of the invisible, to God and the Spirit. Out of an inner urge for fulfillment, they should point the way to new love, a way which is in accordance with humankind’s calling. This urgent call, from Friedrich Lienhard and others, expressed the views of wide circles in Christian revivalism and in the German Youth Movement. Yet this call did not strike home. Therefore today (1932) at the eleventh hour it must find a voice more urgently than ever before. In the nationalistic fervor to exalt Germany’s calling again, as it was more than a century ago, it must not be forgotten that the highest and the ultimate calling, even of Germans, is to become true men and women. This book is meant to help us consider that calling.

In this we may go along with Fichte (and all movements that are national in a true way) when he says:

Blessed for me the hour when I decided to think about myself and my destiny. All my questions are answered; I know what it is possible for me to know; and I have no worries about what I cannot know. I am satisfied; there is perfect agreement and clarity in my spirit, for which a glorious new existence begins. What the whole of my destiny will be, I do not know: what I am to be and will become is beyond my comprehension. Part of this destiny is hidden from me, visible to One alone, the Father of Spirits, to whom it is entrusted. I only know that it is secure, and that it is eternal and glorious, as he himself is. But that part which is entrusted to me myself, I know thoroughly, and it is the root of all the rest of my knowledge.¹

In recognizing this destiny, which the Father of Spirits alone sees quite clear and open before him, Fichte came progressively closer to the Bible. For him it was the book of those witnesses who were filled with the spirit of all good spirits, the book in which God’s Spirit has found the deepest and purest expression. Inner Land is meant as a guide into the heart and soul of the Bible. The heart of the Bible is more than the letter. Even with the Bible, literal interpretation leads to spiritual death, to innermost untruthfulness. Only the Spirit who fills the heart of the Bible can lead us to its